Counseling flight crews after 9/11 changed her life

Sept. 10, 2012

Updated Aug. 21, 2013 1:17 p.m.

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As a psychotherapist, Dr. Debra Holland of Fullerton offered Critical Incident Stress Debriefing to American Airlines flight crews and other personnel at Los Angeles International Airport for the three weeks following the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. PAUL RODRIGUEZ, THE ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER

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LAX was deserted following the attacks on Sept. 11, 2001. as flights around the country were grounded. MICHAEL GOULDING, THE ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER

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Media outlets at LAX wait as news develops throughout the day following terrorist attacks on on Sept. 11, 2001. H. LORREN AU JR., THE ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER

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As a psychotherapist, Dr. Debra Holland of Fullerton offered Critical Incident Stress Debriefing to American Airlines flight crews and other personnel at Los Angeles International Airport for the three weeks following the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. PAUL RODRIGUEZ, THE ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER

As a psychotherapist, Dr. Debra Holland of Fullerton offered Critical Incident Stress Debriefing to American Airlines flight crews and other personnel at Los Angeles International Airport for the three weeks following the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.PAUL RODRIGUEZ, THE ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER

The faces that turned as Dr. Debra Holland walked into the hotel ballroom were marked with the emotions of the day. Fear. Anger. Disbelief. People sat in small groups under the hotel lights, the room smothered in dread.

They were the flight crew members ordered to the ground in the early hours of Sept. 11, 2001, as the Pentagon burned and the Twin Towers disintegrated into dust, debris and death. They were stuck in a hotel ballroom in Los Angeles, far from their families and just as far from normal life. Some had only T-shirts from the hotel gift shop to wear.

Holland was also walking into the unknown. A psychotherapist from Fullerton, she had spent her career counseling broken hearts and broken spirits – a healer, she would say, of those who felt life wasn't quite working out. She had answered a call for crisis counselors, a family doctor volunteering for a turn in the trauma ward.

What would I do? an airline pilot asked that first day. What would I do if I had to fly my plane into the ground?

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Tuesday's anniversary of the attacks has become not just a day of tolling bells and silent moments, but also a day of service for volunteers here and across the country, a tribute to the pull-together spirit of 2001. Like everyone, Holland just wanted to do what she could to help in the anxious days after the attacks. It changed her life.

It was a patient who first told Holland that something was happening in New York that morning, with the same three words being repeated all over the world: Have you heard? She turned on the television in time to see the second tower collapse.

She knew what the emotions would be, even as she began calling her clients, making sure they were all right. Anger, of course, and fear – What's safe? Are we safe? Horror and pity for the people trapped on the top floors of doomed buildings. Helplessness. And that sense of disbelief, the same this-can't-be-happening feeling you get when someone close to you dies suddenly.

Big problems became small. One client who had been squabbling with his co-workers agreed that now was the time to make peace. A woman who had been fighting with her husband wanted to talk about the final phone calls that people made to their loved ones, to say goodbye.

Holland was still working with her clients the next day when she got a call from an old friend, a fellow counselor who was doing crisis work for the airlines at Los Angeles International Airport. They needed help. There were dozens of crew members stranded in the limbo of an airport hotel.

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Think of crisis counseling this way: There's a movie that plays in your head after a traumatic event, sometimes over and over, and it's the counselor's job to fast-forward you through it. Maybe you witnessed a crime, and that movie in your mind puts you in the victim's place. Maybe you just fled a wildfire, and you can picture the smoke and flames if your house burns down.

Maybe you're an airline crew member on 9/11, and you know exactly what it was like on the hijacked planes – the smells, the sounds, the routines of each flight – in the moments before everything changed.

Holland had never done crisis counseling. She was a relationship specialist, a pause-and-rewind button who helped her clients walk back through the experiences that had shaped them and feel out their emotions. The tools of her trade were questions – "How did that make you feel?" – not hard answers about how to keep that mental movie from starting again.

She could sense so much anxiety when she walked into the hotel ballroom that it was almost a presence itself. It jangled in her mind as well. She and the other counselors were there to help guide the flight attendants and pilots into a new normal, but nobody knew what that looked like.

A flight attendant choked up as she explained that she had been on one of the hijacked planes two weeks earlier. Heads nodded. Everyone in the room had flown before on one of the hijacked planes, or been on the same route, or knew somebody killed in the attacks.

It could have been me, the woman said, the movie starting up again in her mind. Focus on the fact that it wasn't, Holland told her. Be grateful for that.

Holland had always trusted her instincts – the gut feeling that she called her prompt, and that always seemed to guide her to the right answer. Now it told her to look forward, not back, to focus on what people could do, not just on what they had lost.

When flight attendants worried about getting back on a plane, she had them replace the hijack movie in their mind with a boring replay of routine, a perfectly ordinary flight. When people talked about how much they just wanted to get out of that ballroom and see their families again, she assured them it would happen soon.

And when a pilot wondered aloud how he could bring himself to crash his own plane, she agreed that the possibility was part of the new normal. But those kinds of what-ifs are all around us, she said, and always have been. What if a child darts in front of your car, and you have no other option but to swerve and crash? The fear of that doesn't keep you from driving.

A small, older woman spoke up one day. She was a flight attendant, and all of her training for hijack situations – make nice, follow their demands – had just been replaced with a new rule: Fight for your life. What could we do? she asked.

"You could feel the energy change," she says now. "You could see them sitting upright."

You have options, she told the group. You have strengths.

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Holland spent three weeks working with the stranded crew members at LAX, guiding them through their grief, reassuring them that they would get to that new normal. At night, she had to trick herself to sleep by imagining a swim in the ocean – the sound of the waves, the feel of the water, the smell of the salt air.

But she learned something about herself as well. "I walk into a situation that's chaotic, that's frightening, and I can make (people) feel better."

When Hurricane Katrina howled ashore a few years later, Holland flew to Louisiana as a mental-health relief worker, counseling people on the edges of their shelter cots. When wildfires scoured north Orange County in 2008, Holland stood with evacuees in the Red Cross shelters.

Earlier this year, she became the first recipient of an award that honors Orange County caregivers whose "kindness and dedication to serving others is inspirational." The award, given by Fairhaven Memorial Park & Mortuary, recognized Holland for volunteering "time and again to help people find comfort in the wake of extreme chaos."

She still volunteers to drop into that chaos and do what she can to help people feel better – at an office shooting in Irwindale earlier this year, for example. But she's spending more time these days writing. She's a self-published author of historical romances and fantasy novels – "Wild Montana Sky," "Sower of Dreams."

Her crisis work doesn't intrude on the worlds she creates on the page – although she knows enough to give her heroine some nightmares or a flashback after something bad happens. But she said there is an idea that underlies both her writing and the kind of work she did on Sept. 11:

"Life can change in a minute, for good or for bad," she said. "It's how often that change can catch us off guard."

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